Alex Jones claims to be ‘playing a character,’ but Stephen Colbert is the real ‘performance artist.’

04.18.17 12:59 AM ET

“There was some surprising news this week about InfoWars founder and customer-making-the-waitress-cry Alex Jones,” Colbert said on the Late Show. “The insane radio host is in a custody battle right now and so he’s trying to prove that he’s stable enough to care for children. Unfortunately, he works in front of a camera.”

After playing a montage of some of Jones’s greatest hits, he added, “Clips like that make Alex Jones seem less like a fit parent and more like a coked-out football coach in a police standoff."

At a pretrial hearing for his child custody case, Jones’s lawyer tried to argue that President Trump’s go-to “real news” source has been “playing a character” this whole time. “I’m not sure that helps,” Colbert, who spent a decade “playing a character” named “Stephen Colbert” on Comedy Central said. “Do we really want children to be raised by performance artists?”

“Of course, not everyone realizes he’s playing a character,” Colbert continued, referring to the president, who appeared on Jones’s show during the campaign. Trump promised not to “let down” the radio host and predicted that within a year, Jones would be saying “wow.”

“Mr. President, we’ve been saying ‘wow’ since day one,” Colbert said. “But here’s the deal: If Alex Jones is a character, then President Trump got fished, hard. This is worse than when George H.W. Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Robocop.”

Colbert said he “feels” for Jones because “everybody knows that, for many years, I played a satirical right-wing character.” No, he wasn’t talking about his Colbert Report alter ego but rather “talk radio host Tuck Buckford.”

With that, Colbert cut to a clip of his InfoWars-esque show called “BrainFight” where he said, “Listen, people! The liberals want to tattoo Obama logos onto the skin of Christian babies! OK? And it makes me want to fight! Fight with my fists! My blood is on fire! My heart is a volcano! It’s time to throw a virgin in there!”

“I am a skeleton wrapped in angry meat! I’m a warrior! I’m a king!” he continued. “One thing I’m not is a performance artist! I hate artists because Andy Warhol put chemicals in Campbell’s soup to turn veterans into bisexual zombies! Now a word from our sponsor: self-lubricating catheters! Buy my vitamins!”